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Abstract
Our concept of politics – especially democracy – presupposes a principle of friendship, but our principle of friendship comes out of an understanding of the friend. However, from the Greeks to Derrida, such relations have been dominated by a philosophy of presence and/or absence, limiting our very idea of politics and friendship. A radical break with this tradition is only possible through an other way of speaking to, thinking about, acting toward, and being a friend, and the politics thereof. The Aristotelian saying, “O friends, [there is] no friend,” provides a clue – for “being” is not there, not present in the Greek, nor absent therefrom, but just implied. Then the being of the friend, and of politics (and of being), is an implication. So, if we hope to be friends, and to be political, we must think and act and speak by implication: O friends no friend, and O democrats no democracy.
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Notes
1 Aristotle, Ethica Eudemia (Oxford UP, 1991), 1245a30; Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, edited by Tiziano Dorandi (Cambridge UP, 2013), 5.20; Aristotle, Politica (Oxford UP, 1957), 1280b38.
2 Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié (Galilée, 1994), 122.
3 Ibid. 122.
4 Diogenes, op. cit. 356; Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, translated by Pamala Mensch (Oxford UP, 2018), 222. See Aristotle, “the man who has many friends has no friend [outheis philos hō polloi philoi]” (Ethica Eudemia 1245b20–21); “those who have many friends and mix intimately with them all are thought to be no one’s friend [hoi de polyphiloi kai pasin oikeiōs entygchanontes oudeni dokousin einai philoi]” (Ethica Nicomachea (Oxford UP, 1991), 1171a15–17).
5 Michel de Montaigne, Les essais (Arléa, 2002), 147; Derrida, op. cit. 12.
6 Derrida, op. cit. 303. Obviously, the “explication” here is not simply explanatory, not merely exegetical; on the contrary, explaining is interpreting and interpreting is arguing – and in most radical form, it is the act of thinking.
7 Aristotle, Ethica Eudemia 1235b14–15.
8 Ibid. 1236b3.
9 Ibid. 1236b26, 1244b16–17.
10 Montaigne, op. cit. 145.
11 Aristotle, Ethica Eudemia 1240b2–3, 1246a13; Derrida, op. cit. 348.
12 Diogenis Laertii, De vitis, dogmatis et apophthegmatis clarorum philosophorum, edited by Huebnerus (H.S. Casaubon, 1594), 326: this edition simply reads: omega with circumflex and smooth breathing. See also Montaigne, op. cit. 147; Derrida, op. cit. 12.
13 Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus?, translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford UP, 2009), 27–28.
14 Derrida, op. cit. 64, 240.
15 Ibid. 52, 55, 62–63, 247, 267–68; Derrida, Dire l’événement, est-ce possible? (L’Harmattan, 2001), 100. For the philosophical origin of this traditional language and logic of both–and, see Plato, Parmenides, Complete Works, edited by John Cooper (Hackett, 1997), 166c2–5; emphasis added:
Let us then say this – and also that, as it seems, whether one is or is not, it and the others both are and are not, and both appear and do not appear all things in all ways, both in relation to themselves and in relation to each other.
16 Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault tel que je l’imagine (fata morgana, 1986), 64; Derrida, Politiques 263. Indeed, as Derrida notes (Politiques 252, 259, 282, 320) it is out of a “more originary” otherness, this “non-reappropriable alterity,” irreducible to me, self, self-sameness, that friendship comes. And implication is only a more originary “third” in a metaphorical sense – for presence and absence are not things; they are how implication is and/or is not present and/or absent.
17 Derrida, Politiques 320. As Derrida notes in “Heidegger’s Ear: Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV),” a text which is included in the French version (Politiques 346, 348) but only published separately in English: Heidegger thinks friendship in terms of distance and nearness, Ferne and Nähe, la distance et la proximité, that is, the friend “always goes and comes [stets hin und her]; here, toward presence; there, toward absence” – for the difference is the unity of both through which they happen, that is, the relation through which they come-to-presence and go-out-into-absence, Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, edited by John Sallis (Indiana UP, 1993), 167; emphasis added; see Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, Gesammtausgabe, GA12 (Klöstermann, 1985), 18. On Heidegger’s thought of “the possibility of the impossibility” (as the structure of being-toward-death) a possibility that must be “understood as possibility, cultivated as possibility, and in relation to it, endured as possibility,” that is, potentiality irreducible to actuality, or “anticipation” qua absence that cannot be translated into the language and logic of presence, see Sein und Zeit, GA2 347–48.
18 Although we cannot consider it here, Derrida (Politiques 225, 234) does not stop with the aporetic interpretation of Aristotle; rather, if both the “modern” and the “ancient” interpretations are equally possible (even necessary, insofar as it is impossible to determine which text corresponds to the original) it is not because, again, this is simply a philological conundrum or merely a matter of “grammatical undecidability” – it is because the relation between the texts (and the friendships and politics founded thereon) itself constitutes an aporia of the non-aporetic and the aporetic, of the or-structure and the and-structure, which Derrida names the “hyper-aporetic.”
19 The German translation is closer: “Viele Freunde, kein freund,” Diogenes Laertius, Leben und Meinungen berühmter Philosophen, translated by Otto Apelt (Meiner, 2015), 234.
20 Derrida, Politiques 289.
21 Ibid. 330.
22 Ibid. 331.
23 Ibid. 332.
24 Ibid. 339.
25 Ibid. 333; Aristotle, Politica 1280b39.
26 Derrida, Politiques 339.
27 Aristotle, Ethica Eudemia 1234b18–20.
28 Emmanuel Lévinas, Éthique et infini (Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1982), 34.
29 Although in the first French phrase, Derrida supplements Cicero’s Latin with being, in the second phrase, he lets being be implied: “Dès lors les absents même sont présents […] et, ce qui est plus difficile à dire, les morts vivent … ” (Politiques 10; emphasis added); Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Senectute De Amicitia De Divinatione, translated by William Armistead Falconer (Harvard UP, 1923), 133.
30 G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Meiner, 2009), 281. And not only the dead, but death itself (although this is perhaps a topic for another text): it would be easy enough to show that being-toward-death, Sein-zum-Tode, which Heidegger understands in terms of (the event of) the presence and absence of a possible impossibility should actually be thought as implied, which is how my death is implicated in my life – so if I am living, it is not because I am dying; rather, I living implies I dying.
31 Heraclitus, Early Greek Philosophy III (LCL 526), edited by André Laks and Glen Most (Harvard UP, 2016), D41/B93, 156.
32 Aristotle, Politica 1253a37–39, 1280b39, 1281a1; emphasis added; Derrida, Politiques 127, 129, 223–24; Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington, “Politics and Friendship,” A Discussion with Jacques Derrida (Centre for Modern French Thought, University of Sussex, 1 Dec. 1997; originally in English, transcribed from video by Benjamin Noys). For perhaps a contemporary example, see how “Just Stop Oil” throws cold soup (referencing Warhol) onto Van Gogh’s Sunflowers: https://juststopoil.org/2022/10/31/just-stop-oils-response-to-the-van-gogh-sunflowers-action/.
33 Derrida, Politiques 339.